André Bazin, in his unfinished study of Jean Renoir, described
Une partie de campagne
as a "perfectly finished work," one that is not only
faithful in letter and spirit to the Maupassant story from which it was
adapted but also actually improved by Renoir's additions and
refinements to the original tale. This is high praise, indeed, when one
realizes that the film's completion was highly problematic. Many of
Renoir's films have had checkered careers, but none was quite so
confusing as
Une partie de campagne
. Renoir originally intended to shoot a 35- or 40-minute story which he
would make, he wrote later, just as if it were a full-length film. Renoir
chose a gentle, 19th-century tale and planned to spend a relaxed summer
filming along the banks of the Loin near Marlotte, an area he knew
extremely well. The entire experience should have provided him, as
Alexander Sesonske has described it, with a "brief and pleasant
respite in mid-career." Despite the rainiest summer in memory, an
extremely volatile political climate, tensions on the set and the fact
that the film sat for nearly 10 years waiting for its final editing,
Une partie de campagne
is a remarkably fine film, some say a masterpiece; Sesonske thinks that
no Renoir film seems "more unstudied, more a pure flow of life
caught unaware."

There are sound reasons for the film's critical success: it is a
film of uncommon gentleness and beauty, and it forms less of a
"respite" in Renoir's career than a concentration of
his most important themes and images: the river, the countryside, the
loving scrutiny of bourgeois life.
Une partie de campagne
forms a poetic centre for Renoir's French films. Rather than a
sense of diversion, the film reflects a completeness. Renoir's
rendering of his subject matter is incisive, his style mature, his vision
complete; it is a seamless work of art. Many critics have called attention
to the film's impressionistic quality, suggesting that it is a
homage to the director's father, the painter Pierre Auguste Renoir.
Indeed, impressionistic moments do grace the film—but for one to
try to understand it as an attempt by the son to do what the father had
already done with paint and canvas is to sadly underestimate the qualities
of the movie. The "painterly" look of the films of Renoir
fils
have done much to strengthen his popular image as a director of surfaces,
much to the detriment of his standing as a filmmaker of depth and
perception.

The shortness of the film also has strengthened the perception of Renoir
as an impressionistic filmmaker, and many critics today still respond to
the film as incomplete, an interesting but unfinished experiment. The fact
that Renoir left two scenes from the Maupassant story unshot has been used
as evidence for regarding the film as a fragment, and considering
Renoir's relative fidelity to the events of Maupassant's
tale, it is an understandable, if mistaken, conclusion. Published versions
of the screenplay for those "missing" scenes have further
confused the issue. However, closer examination of the relationship
between the story and the film will dispel such misconceptions. Renoir
wrote in his autobiography,
My Life and My Films
, that when he was asked to increase the original footage to feature
length, he refused because he felt that it would have been contrary to the
intent of Maupassant's story and to his screenplay to lengthen it.
Moreover, what many critics have failed to notice is that Renoir, although
he adapted the events of the fiction faithfully, greatly altered the
story's tone, which allowed him to drop the final scenes from the
completed film without leaving the project incomplete.

Maupassant's tantalizingly brief tale is largely satiric in tone.
He makes fun of the pretensions and foibles of his bourgeoisie often
rather harshly; the natural setting is kept in the background; and the
atmosphere of the country is diminished. Renoir not only places greater
emphasis in the rural atmosphere and setting but also makes a film that by
bringing such natural elements into the foreground turns
Maupassant's rather strident attack on the Dufort family into a
compassionate and understanding film about unrecoverable moments and the
inevitable sadness of the loss of innocence and love. As André
Bazin has noted, such changes do improve the original. The story is given
a resonance, the characters motivation, and the ending a poignance lacking
in the fictional source. As Pierre Leprohon has described it:
"there is an overflowing tenderness, and extraordinary
responsiveness to the existence of things, and a transformation of the
commonplace into the sublime." In
Une partie de campagne
, Renoir has created a poetic compression of those things that he holds
dear, which is one of the reasons the film evokes such fond memories and
responses from its viewers. Although unhappy and somewhat ironic, the
ending is nevertheless not unhopeful. Life and the river will both flow on
and be renewed.

—Charles L. P. Silet

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